LL grad’s curiosity leads to possible career

Eric Bella remembers being curious about the culm banks he saw as a child while on hikes with his dad, Paul.

Bella’s inquisitive nature toward coal mining is what led him to become an enthusiast on the subject by the time he was a teenager.

The 18-year-old from Shavertown graduated on June 12 from Lake-Lehman Junior/Senior High School. Bella spent much of his high school years studying about mines and volunteering for preservation groups. He was awarded the 2009 Lake-Lehman High School Citizenship Award and the 2009 Lake Silkworth Lions Club Service Award for his efforts in coal mining.

“I find it absolutely amazing that probably nine out of 10 people in this valley worked in a mine and now it’s gone,” Bella said.

Bella’s enthusiasm for coal mines heightened after his grandmother, Phyllis Bella, told him that her father, Edmund Kruszewski, mined coal on his belly and later drove a mine train in the area. His father also gave him a mining helmet and light that he found as a child when he played in old mines.

Bella started by studying the Huber Breaker and then joined the Anthracite Living History Group. At age 15, he became co-director of the group, which gives presentations, complete with local artifacts.

Last summer, Bella was the youngest speaker at the Abandoned Mine Reclamation Conference in State College. He spoke on the work the Anthracite Living History Group is doing to create a park at the Avondale Mine fire site off Route 11 in Plymouth. The 1869 disaster killed 110 people.

For his senior completion project, Bella worked toward making the park at the Avondale Mine site a reality. He put in 100 hours of community service, cutting down poison ivy at the site and helped apply for funding. Bella says the group has received $9,000 in grant money from the state and $500 from the Eastern Pennsylvania Coalition for Abandoned Mine Reclamation for the project.

Bella is a member of the Eastern Pennsylvania Coalition for Abandoned Mine Reclamation, the Huber Breaker Preservation Society and the Luzerne County Historical Society. He also belongs to the Underground Miners Group which restores abandoned mining equipment. The group recently restored a four-ton 1926 Whictomb electric storage battery locomotive that came from a culm bank near Scranton.

Bella also serves as a tour guide every Sunday for the No. 9 Coal Mine and Museum in Lansford.

This summer, he is interning as a mine map repository technician for the U.S. Department of Interior Office of Surface Mining in the Stegmaier Building in Wilkes-Barre. He is in charge of mine maps and scans old maps into the system. Some maps date back to the 1780s.

“You want to know what’s underneath your house,” Bella said of why people come in to look at the maps. “It’s really important for us to know where these mines are, where to build.”

Bella will attend Penn State Wilkes-Barre where he will major in mining engineering. He plans to finish his bachelor’s degree at Penn State University Park and hopes to attain an even higher degree at Colorado School of Mines or West Virginia University.